The European Association of Science Editors (EASE) is an international community of individuals and associations from diverse backgrounds, linguistic traditions and professional experience in science communication and editing.

Cochrane-REWARD prize for reducing waste in health research

Cochrane is now calling for nominations for the 2018 prize.

The Lancet series on adding value and reducing waste in research has documented that much research is wasted because its outcomes cannot be used. The waste occurs during 5 stages of research production: question selection, study design, research conduct, publication, and reporting. This type of research waste has been estimated at a global loss of around $170 billion per year. Much of this waste appears to be avoidable or remediable, but there is little recognition of the need to develop and implement the needed remedies.

The Cochrane-REWARD prize is intended to stimulate and promote research to address the issue of research waste, highlighting both underused “remedies” and the need to invest in research to identify problems and solutions to them.

The prize is open to any person or organization that has tested and implemented strategies to reduce waste in one of the five stages of research production in the area of health (defined as the range of behavioural, biological, socio-economic and environmental factors that influence the health status of individuals or populations).

All nominations will be assessed using the following criteria:

The nominee has addressed at least one of the 5 stages of research waste (questions, design, conduct, publication, reporting) in the area of health;

The nominee has pilot or more definitive data showing the initiative can lower waste;

The initiative can be scaled up;

The estimated potential reduction in research waste that the initiative might achieve.

Nominations will be assessed by a panel of 10 members, who will select two entries to win a funding award, paid over the next two years.

First prize will be awarded £3000 (£1500 per year); 2nd prize will be awarded funding of £2000 (£1000 per year).

Deadline for nominations is May 15th, 2018. The winners will be announced at the Cochrane Colloquium, Edinburgh, 16-18 September, 2018.

Interested parties should read through the full details and apply using the entry form here.

The conference aims to provide a forum for scholars, practitioners and science stakeholders to share evidence on peer review in different fields, e.g., medicine, computer science, social sciences and humanities. It aims to stimulate the use of evidence-based research in the design and implementation of peer review in a variety of fields and encourage more systematic research.

The conference will feature original research, position papers, literature reviews that use any method (e.g., quantitative, experimental or qualitative) to investigate peer review in a variety of scientific domains (e.g., scholarly journals, funding agencies, research assessment).

Two of our members have written a response to Moher et al.’s ‘Core competencies for scientific editors of biomedical journals: consensus statement’, published in BMC Medicine in 2017, from their perspective as authors’ editors.

Valerie Matarese and Karen Shashok’s correspondence article in F1000Research offers some “insights into the types of competencies researchers from diverse geographical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds would value in journal editors.”

The paper discusses several issues, including the definition of journal editor, competencies which were considered then removed during the Delphi process, inappropriate text re-use, and suggests the role of journal editors could encompass some author-editing skills, to give more nuanced feedback on writing and language beyond “blanket “acceptable/unacceptable” assessments”.

EASE Council nominations for 2018-2021

Reminder for recommendations for new EASE Council members – Deadline for nominations is 10th March, 2018

Council elections are held every three years. The last elections for EASE Council were held in 2015, and new elections will therefore be held in 2018.

At the next EASE Annual General Meeting (in Bucharest, 8th June 2018), it will be time to elect a new Council to serve EASE for the next 3 years.

Council consists of a President, the immediate Past President, two Vice-Presidents, Secretary, Treasurer and 5 ordinary members, plus the Editor of the association’s in-house journal (European Science Editing). The Council may co-opt to three additional members (14 members in total, excluding Secretary).

The currently elected Nominations Committee (members: Ana Marušić, Joan Marsh, Pippa Smart) have accepted the following invitations to stand:

Members may nominate additional candidates via e-mail up to 10 March 2018 – 90 days before the AGM which will take place in Bucharest, 8th of June, 2018.

Do you know someone who would be great on Council?

The Nominations Committee invites members to submit suggestions for nominations. Individuals must be nominated by another member (please ask your nominee beforehand and confirm that they agree to be nominated).

The term of office will be from June 2018 until the AGM in 2021.

Council meets in-person once a year, before the AGM, either at an EASE conference or a similar event. Other meetings are held by teleconference. Council members are reimbursed their expenses for travel and accommodation for the face-to-face meeting but positions are honorary and there is no salary or fee.

We are especially looking for people with a passion for one or more of the following areas:

A signed letter (sent as PDF or similar) from the nominee agreeing to the nomination, stating their areas of interest and what benefits they can bring to EASE Council

The cv of the nominee

Each nomination will be acknowledged by the secretary. Ballot papers will then be circulated to members, who will vote via e-mail.

– Thursday, 25th January, 2018 –

Hindawi services for institutional repositories

The open access publisher Hindawi have announced a new service for institutions, whereby they will automatically deposit a copy of an article with affiliated authors into the institutional repository as soon as it is published.

The service is designed to reduce the burden on authors and institutions manually transferring files, and looks simple to set up, with Hindawi’s tech team on hand to help with any complications.

Hindawi made headlines last year when they left the STM Association as a result of the conservative and obstructive stance the organisation is taking with regards to open access (a position underscored with their open access Statement to the EU open access, published in December and now removed from the web).

This new service looks further their goals of supporting freely available reseach, and should be a very helpful facility for any staff involved in tracking and measuring the research output of their institutions or faculties.

Social Media, Science and MOOCs

An article published in FEMS Microbiology Letters reviews the use of Twitter as a tool for scientists to “increase their personal brand, improve their skills, enhance their visibility, share and communicate science to society, promote scientific culture, and even as a tool for teaching and learning”

The authors assess their experiences of using Twitter as part of a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) in Spain and Latin America, present some of the measurable benefits they discovered through its use, and propose an extension to this strategy with a pan-European Microbiology MOOC in the near future.

The article is behind an OUP paywall, but anyone with access to the journal may find much of interest in this article.

New APA Reporting Standards

Following a review of existing reporting standards, the American Psychological Association has published a paper which sets out revisions to existing standards, and adding new sets which address current positions and knowledge.

Changes to existing standards have been made to the meta-analysis section, and in the hypotheses, analyses, and conclusions, dividing them into 3 groupings (primary, secondary, and exploratory). Some new modules found in this version include standards for observational studies, clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and replication studies.

We recommend that all journal publishers, editors, authors and reviewers in the psychological sciences field read these, incorporate them as best practice guidelines in assessing papers for publication, and for all researchers to reference when designing and reporting their work.

Taylor & Francis to pay reviewers in fast track publishing service

Providing authors with faster peer review and rewarding reviewers for their assistance to publishers in achieving this goal are thorny issues, but one of the large publishers is trying a new initiative.

Taylor & Francis have described how their Accelerated Publication service for authors involves payments of $150 to each peer reviewer who submits their comments within one week.

“Hi there Accelerated Publication covers submission to online publication and is designed to meet the needs of a select group, primarily in the biomedical sciences. (1/6)

This service is designed to give authors more control over timing of publication to fit with grant deadlines, product launches etc (2/6)

Reviewers are paid an honorarium on completion of their review because we are asking them to complete within a set timeframe. (3/6)

This timeframe is clear in all correspondence to reviewers invited to review Accelerated Publication submissions, and they accept the invitation on this basis. (4/6)

Payment is completely independent of their recommendation to the editor and many papers are in fact rejected e.g. CMRO had rejection rate of 52% on Accelerated Publication submissions in 2017 (5/6)

Hope this explains but if you have any more questions please contact us on communications@tandf.co.uk, and we’ll come back to you as quickly as we can. (6/6)”

This is not the first time a large publisher has tried a fast-track system involving payments to peer reviewers. In 2015, Nature’s Scientific Reports set up a trial with Rubriq to offer a similar service, which saw one of their editors quit the journal in protest.

This was part of a trial for conceptual journal-independent peer review services, where companies conduct a scientific review of papers, then pass them to a suitable journal where the decision process could be accelerated. However, during 2017, Rubriq and Axiom Review, a company providing similar services, both folded due to lack of take-up. It seems that vision for payment and speed incentives was not right for the time or place.

T&F have been actively involved in trying to determine suitable means of compensating their reviewers for some time. In 2016 they published a white paper titled “Peer Review – a global view”, which investigated many opinions around the process, one section of which addressed incentives. The survey identified strong support for free access to papers, waivers for open access and page fees, and recognition, in the form of certificates or a published list of names (with stronger support if the name was not directly related to the paper).

On the subject of direct financial compensation, their survey found a lack of consensus, with almost equal numbers of responses stating they would be “less likely”, “more likely”, and neutrally valenced. Deeper analysis of responses showed the:

“youngest age group (20-29 year olds) are most in favour of receiving payment and those who are 60+ are most resistant. Whether this attitude among younger scholars will change as they progress in their careers, or if the call for reviewers to be paid will grow in time, could be an area of future examination.”

T&F appear to have approached this controversial issue as carefully and diligently as possible before launching this service, so we are keen to watch how response to their version unfolds.

– Sunday 21st January, 2018 –

More steps towards transparency in research publishing

An Editorial published in Nature in September presented some “Steps towards transparency in research publishing” (Nature 2017;549(431), doi: 10.1038/549431a)

The Editorial discusses how progress in the transparency of both research and editorial processes is gathering pace, discussing five forms of transparency documented in a project overseen by Malcolm Macleod of the University of Edinburgh.

In addition to the positive steps, the Editorial also poses questions about the risks involved in opening up, considering whether transparency could give rise to a different sort of bias; for example, some authors do not want to know who authored a positive peer review, so that they can avoid future positive peer review bias themselves.

The International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) invites you to attend a special 90-minute ISMPP U educational webinar: “What’s Your Path? Career Development in Medical Publications”, on Wednesday, January 17, at 11 am EST/4 pm GMT.

This ISMPP U is complimentary and open to ALL regardless of ISMPP membership!

This special ISMPP U session is open to the public and may be of interest to students considering career options. Within the medical publications field a rich variety of professional roles exists, offering many rewarding career pathways to pursue. In this webinar, experienced publications professionals will describe a range of typical roles at pharmaceutical companies and medical communications agencies, as well as key qualifications for these positions.

The panel will describe job change scenarios they’ve personally observed or experienced where people moved between related functions and settings, growing in leadership and responsibility.

These include creating one’s own role as a freelancer, consultant, or head of a small business.